Where is the line between not raising your child to be a selfish person and being one yourself?
I think it may be more a tightrope than a line and Liam and I seem to walk it every weekend and fall of it about 3 o’clock on Sunday. It’s our witching hour, the trough of our weekly cycle, our low point.
I know this – I don’t like it and yet somehow I rarely seem to be able to prevent us from ending up there, which just frustrates the hell out of me because I know that it should be the exact opposite. It should be Monday morning you dread, right? Not Sunday afternoon.
For the first eight months of Liam’s life my beautiful niece Dominique lived with us – and so Sunday’s were the kind of day I’ve always believed they should be – fewer responsibilities and more time for fun and relaxation. But when she left and it became just Liam and me on the weekends, the departure of his nanny on Friday afternoon began a 50 to 60 hour stretch when it really was just him and me. I once saw another mother’s Facebook post in which she admitted that she hated the weekends and I felt the kind of horror that you do when someone has given voice to an unspeakable truth. To say that the time you spend alone with your child is not the most precious time of all seems like violating a basic tenet of good mothering. But six years in to my single parent experience I can still say that by the time we are hitting 40+hours of each other’s company – things are getting tense.
I know that much of the problem is based in my personality. I’m a loner, who lives mostly in my head and who always has a long list of things on my ‘to do’ list. I push at life – and by the weekend there usually ain’t a whole lot of energy left. Now that I think back to what weekends were like before Liam came along I can see that they were time I gave to myself. More often than not I didn’t engage with the rest of the world and many times I didn’t even venture outside for at least one whole day. It was my time to unplug, to destress, to stop. To recharge.
